The Moz Blog

Goodbye To An Old Friend: Marketplace

The author's posts are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.

The SEOmoz Marketplace, born in early 2007, passed away peacefully in January 2012. Cause of death: Old, out-dated code, 5 year old design, manual spam maintenance and was ridden with unfixable bugs. The Marketplace lived a very full life and helped many people find their perfect SEO job, while giving companies a place to show their stuff. Our dear Marketplace was loved by all and spammed by many.

A service is being held in his honor today, here on the SEOmoz blog to bid farewell to our good pal. Please feel free to say a little something in the comments, and let Marketplace know just how much you cared.

Wait... What?

When it comes to our Marketplace, let's be honest, we haven't put our best foot forward lately. When it made its first appearance back in 2007 it was a great addition to our site and for our community. As we have grown, the Marketplace always seemed to be one area of our website that was neglected and as you can see from the screenshots below it's a few design revisions behind. Today we are announcing that the Marketplace will be closing its doors next week.

But don't fret! We will be keeping our
Recommend List (the most visited page in the Marketplace) and will give it a brand new look and feel. Over the past few weeks we've worked on putting together a comprehensive list of companies we recommend. There is some amazing talent out there! More details about getting on the recommend list will be included when the new list is released.

A Look Back

Over the years, the Marketplace did its job (hehe get it.. job.. ok nevermind) well but recently it has fallen into despair a bit. Not only is the design old, but it has put a strain on other systems, causing the site to slow down. The current Marketplace wasn't built to scale with the growth we have seen in the past couple years, and we're feeling the strain now. For example, there are pages that do not paginate, pages that don't cache, database queries that are not optimized, and additional pages that open our website to attacks. Take a peek at the amazing transormation it has seen in the past 4-5 years (aka none).

Marketplace 2007/2008

Marketplace 2012

Along with the design that hasn't changed, the code that powers the Marketplace is outdated and tired as well. The system has many bugs that cause things not to work and provide a poor user experience that we are not proud of. Currently our resources are strained building an amazing product for the community and sometimes things need to get cut. In the future we hope to add additional features into our user profiles that our users can use to promote themselves but we have yet to decide what will get done.

The Marketplace was also a very well known place to spam and without a process of detecting that spam it became a very labor-intensive process that we have a problem keeping up with. Our Marketplace was meant for a place to list your internet marketing company but it seemed that one of our favorite many plumbers found it a great place to spam also.

Alternatives

In place of our Marketplace we are encouraging you to utilize
Linkedin. Post your job on your company page and then you are welcome to share it in our SEOmoz group.

A Note About "Old" Q&A

On another note, for those members who have been around for a while will remember our original Q&A system. We will also be making a change to the way that old system works. Currently those questions are all publicly available but will be removed from public view along with the Marketplace. The top viewed questions will be migrated over to our new system and the other questions will be removed in 6 months. If you are a long time member and have questions you would like to keep, please copy them into a safe place as they will be removed in 6 months. All of your old questions can be found
here.

Final Note

We would like to thank everyone who has participated in the Marketplace and would love to hear any success stories that you have had there. Additionally, if you have other great resources that may help community members find work, please leave those suggestions in the comments.

About caseyhen —
I have a passion for both learning and helping people. I'm often found up late at night coding or designing something for my clients or one of my many secret projects. I'm a huge fan of tracking and trying to figure out what Google is up too! Feel free to follow me on Twitter: @caseyhen

Ah, this is too bad. I know of at least 2 occasions where previous clients contacted me after they found us here on the marketplace.

While it's great the "recommended list" will be resuscitated, I think it unfortunately is biased to companies that do the "right networking" in order to get on the list and don't give the "little guys" (or gals) who are starting in the business a chance like we got a while back when the marketplace at least allowed us to be there. We also got a few recommendations as well which gave us at least the 2 calls that we recall.

Love to get info on getting onto the recommended list. I think I'm an especially good candidate because I can both pat my head and rub my tummy simultaneously. Other services provided include touching my elbow to my ear. Trust me when I say that's the key to making clients happy.
:D

p.d.: curious to see the new and renewed Reccomended List, as it is honestly the best justified alternative to the infamous TopSEOs list for all the businesses out there looking for reviews of SEO agencies/professionals.

I'm not on that list but in fairness I know worthy agencies that are, and anyways... if they're using another channel to get leads... doesn't that make them smarter than us plebes who aren't in said channel? Thus making them top in a sense.

We often find a large number of these and tend to ban them if we don't see any activity on the account or spammy activity but we tend to be on the safe side with most accounts and only ban if we know they are spam. If you run across anything you think is suspect please feel free to email me.